A public values approach for using digital technologies to enhance local democracy
Workshop idea by Dr Paul Hepburn
All of the workshops at Local Democracy for Everyone have been created by our participants. We’re sharing a summary of each workshop idea to help you decide what you’d most like to participate in – and so that everyone can start to share their comments about each idea.
A public values approach for using digital technologies to enhance local democracy
The challenge:
How can we create more collaborative, inclusive and democratic processes for developing policy and delivering public services? Public values are an important place to start in this discussion as they focus on what has meaning for people, not what public administrators think might be best for them. Significantly, this suggests an active sense of adding or creating value rather than a passive sense of safeguarding the status quo.
How do we capture or determine what is of public value?
How do we enable the voices of ordinary citizens to be heard above that those that traditionally dominate the political discourse?
Can digital technology help or are the usual suspects going to dominate online as they do offline?
Might a local citizens’ alliance based on civic or community groups better contest the public sphere?
#notwestminster #values
Dr Paul Hepburn
Heseltine Institute for Public Policy and Practice, University of Liverpool
Dr Paul Hepburn is a post–doctoral researcher for the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy and Practice at the University of Liverpool. Paul was awarded a PhD studentship at the University of Manchester in 2007 to examine the impact of the internet on local democracy. This followed a 20 year career in local government primarily working in policy development and delivery that latterly focused on e-government initiatives.
Most recently he has worked upon evaluating local policy innovations such as the Liverpool Mayoral model and the co-production of tablet technology for elderly people.
